


Pretty Kind of Dirty Face

by a_lrightevans



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-25
Updated: 2016-06-25
Packaged: 2018-07-18 01:57:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7294876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_lrightevans/pseuds/a_lrightevans
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lily is a hitwoman but like, a hitwoman with a moral compass. and James is next in line for a bullet in the brain but instead of shooting him she falls in love with him and really its all very inconvenient.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pretty Kind of Dirty Face

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Jily trope fest 2016
> 
> Contains death and gun violence that I guess you would expect from a hitwoman au but like, not super graphic, and no major character death.

James Potter closes his eyes, counts to ten, and tries his best not to panic. 

  
(The pretty girl with hair the colour of blood holding a gun to his temple is making it pretty fucking difficult.) 

  
And it isn’t that he’s scared. James doesn’t _do_ scared. It’s just that it’s a Tuesday afternoon, and nothing interesting ever happens on Tuesday afternoons, so he’s just a little thrown off, is all. Plus, he’s only twenty-two, and if he dies at twenty-two it will be a real disappointment, especially if its over a murder he didn’t even commit.

  
The gun twists against his head, he shifts, tries to keep the tremor out of his hands. 

  
'Well _bugger_.'

**

‘Those are terrible last words.’ says Lily, and pushes the gun more firmly against his skull. ‘Do you want to go again?’   
She watches his face. His eyes are moving back and fourth behind his glasses and he’s chewing his bottom lip and she can almost see his mind racing at a mile-a-minute beneath his ridiculous hair.   
When he finally speaks, his hands are shaking slightly, but he sounds impressively blasé for someone who is about to have his brains blown out. 

‘You know it couldn’t have been me.’ 

Lily grins. 

‘Exciting,’ she says, ‘I love a plot twist. And how do I know that?’ 

‘There were size nine footprints at the scene.’ He lifts up a foot for her to inspect. ‘Size ten.’ 

Lily glances at his shoe and considers this. 

‘Doesn’t really prove anything.’

‘Maybe not.’ He licks his lips. ‘But you don’t strike me as somebody who kills on an off chance.’ 

  
**  
The thing is, it isn’t like Lily had _intended_ to become a hitwoman. She’d never killed anyone before, never thought about killing anyone- not more than what she thought was probably perfectly normal, anyway. 

But when the short girl with dark spiky hair she met in the pub when she was eighteen began whispering about corrupt governments and justice systems, rebellion and taking the law into their own hands... Lily hadn’t been able to resist the invitation to the meeting that’d been slipped into her pocket. Within the month she’d been initiated into The Order. She learned how to shoot, how to fight, how not to leave any evidence. Then, when she was twenty-one, there’d been a name and address pressed into the palm of her hand. She set fire to the note, then shot Amycus Carrow in the head and burned the body. He had murdered fourteen innocent people. She didn’t feel as guilty as she thought she would. 

**

‘What kind of person do I strike you as, then?’ 

James Potter was supposed to be her eleventh kill. Her eleventh kill currently had a shit-eating grin on his face.

‘The type of person who would’ve already pulled the trigger if you were really going to kill me?’ he tries, and slowly, she lowers the gun from his head, puts the safety on. 

‘I need you to tell me everything.’  
**  
James follows the girl that just tried to kill him back to her car as if that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and she blindfolds him then drives them back to her house. They sit in her bright yellow-painted kitchen and he tells her everything he knows about the murder of Gideon and Fabian Prewett, and then a whole lot more. She writes it all down in purple gel pen whilst humming cheerfully under her breath. 

Once they’ve finished, she says ‘Snacks?’ and James shrugs, so she takes a carton of cherries out of the fridge and they spend the next forty-five minutes trying to toss them into each other’s mouths from across the kitchen table. They come up with a complex scoring system and James wins, so Lily gives him half a Terry’s chocolate orange as a prize, and a kiss on the cheek, which he reckons isn’t a bad day’s work considering the very same girl had been holding a gun to his head four hours ago.

***

A week later Lily gets a text from the disposable phone she had given James emergencies. It just says ‘I want in. I have friends who want in, too.’ 

Lily considers this. All of the information he had provided seemed to add up with what they already knew. It seemed that Potter and three of his friends had already been making quite a stir on their own; posting anonymous exposés online on corrupt government officials and business owners.

Among the many that they had targeted was a man that seemed to keep popping up behind every case that The Order came across- Tom Riddle. They didn’t know much about him except that he’d come from nothing, wanted money and power, and didn’t seem to mind conning, torturing and murdering whoever the hell he needed to in order to get it. Riddle was hidden deep. Lily was impressed that four twenty-two year old boys had managed to come this far without getting themselves killed. 

Lily’s theory: Riddle caught wind of their identities, murdered the Prewett’s, and framed James knowing that The Order would target him in retaliation. Two birds with one stone, nice and clean, half the dirty work with double the pay off, and hopefully no more meddling kids.  But Lily couldn’t prove any of this, and James was still technically a suspect, so it would be ridiculous to even entertain the idea of inducting him to The Order. 

And yet. 

Instead of ignoring him like she knows she should, she sends him a time, address, instructions to wear a mask and a kissy face emoji, then wonders just how much shit she is getting herself into. 

**

Turns out, James’s idea of an inconspicuous disguise is a Giraffe mask Lily is pretty sure they sell at London Zoo. 

‘It’s all I had.’

‘I can’t let your friends in.’

“I can vouch for all of them. I swear.’ 

Lily regards him, sighs, adjusts her own yellow balaclava. 

‘You realise its going to be tough enough convincing The Order to trust you.’ 

‘Right.’ James runs a hand through his already untidy hair. ‘Sorry. That’s fair.’ 

‘Once they know they can trust you, they might consider your friends. Now come on.’ 

Lily knows that she is breaking about a dozen rules, putting her position in The Order on the line and risking all of their lives, and yet, she can’t help but think this is somehow meant to be. So she ties a blindfold over James’s Giraffe mask, guides him to her car, then drives him to the Order Headquarters. 

**  
‘Lily!’

‘What the fuck, Evans?’

‘Oh for Christ’s sake-’ 

‘Miss Evans,’ the rumbling voice of Alastor Moody cuts straight through the general hubbub caused by their entrance. ‘My office. Now. And cuff up our guest before you come, would you?’ 

Lily handcuffs James to a wall, blindfold still on, and gives him an apologetic pat on the shoulder before joining Moody in his office. He shouts at her for twenty-three minutes and forty seven seconds (she counts), before asking her for an explanation. 

‘I trust him,’ she says simply, ‘I think he’ll be a great asset. Its a calculated risk and one I think we should take.’ 

‘You trust him?’ 

Lily doesn’t have much else to say in her own defense, so she stays quiet, just nods. She is half expecting Moody to kick her out and tell her never to return, maybe even but a bullet in her head for good measure, but he must see something in her face, because after a moment he just nods. 

‘Fine. He can stay. But there are a lot of innocent lives at risk here, Evans. I hope you know how to live with yourself if you’re wrong.’

***  
For the next couple of weeks, everybody treats James as Lily’s problem. Lily doesn’t particularly mind this, and James doesn’t seem to either, but he _does_ seem to have an issue with other people not liking him. Lily guesses he’s just not used to it, though she isn’t sure how, because turns out he’s the most annoyingly self-assured git to ever grace the planet.

He’s never shot a gun before but he bets her he’ll be able to out shoot her by the end of the week. He’s wrong, of course, and loses miserably, but he is a fast learner and Lily is a good teacher so he is better than he has any real right to be. Lily isn’t allowed to tell him much but what she can tell him he already seems to know, and informs her of this with smug satisfaction. Despite all of this, there’s just something frustratingly likeable in the way he always seems to be on the edge of a grin or a smart-arse comment, and it isn’t too long before the rest of The Order begin to warm to him.  
After a month, Moody assigns him his first mission. Well, more accurately, he assigns him as backup on Lily’s mission, but it’s a big step. They’ve received intel that Rodulphus Lestrange, a member of Riddle’s inner circle, will be at a warehouse in London next month to pick up some forged documents. It’s an easy job. In, shoot, out, burn the building. Lily has done half a dozen missions just like it on her own before and doubts she will need backup, but she knows that Moody is just testing James, trying to gauge how he handles pressure, so she lets it be.

**  
She finds herself spending more and more time with James outside of training and meetings. Its starts when she turns up at his house one day with the excuse of going over the plan, but its still a month away and they’ve gone over it at least a dozen times already, so they end up drinking a bottle of old-as-fuck wine and inventing a new card game at his kitchen table. After that she’s popping over almost every day they both have off just to take up too much room on his sofa and invent stupid games and talk about nonsense.

‘Remember that time you nearly killed me?’ asks James on one such day, Lily’s fuzzy-socked feet in his lap. She rolls her eyes and aims a playful kick at his head.

‘You’d think I’d actually bloody pulled the trigger, the way you go on about it. What’s a little death threat between friends?’ 

‘True. I’m starting to think its how you show affection.’

They sit there on his sofa for so long that Lily doesn’t even notice it going dark around them, until the only light left is coming from the TV, playing reruns of How I Met Your Mother on mute. James’s face has gone oddly soft in the flickering, blue-tinted light, and for the first time she lets herself actually think about the fact that she could have really, _actually_ , killed him. James Potter could just have been another name on her mental list of the Dead. She’d probably have remembered the way his hair stuck up at the back and his glasses sat a little wonky on his nose, but she wouldn’t have known anything else about him. Not that he was left handed or that he’d set the oven on fire the first time he tried to cook an omelet or that he refused to play Monopoly if he couldn’t be the Car. Not that he blinked too much when he was nervous or that his favourite ice-cream flavor was mint choc-chip or that he’d gotten two-hundred and twenty-seven detentions over the course of his schooling career. But she knows these things now and she will never unknow them and there’s a weird, warm feeling in her stomach, so she launches into a highly dramatized story of her seventh kill before she can do something stupid like try to kiss him.

**

One night she turns up, just two days before the mission, to find there is already somebody taking up James’s sofa. Sirius Black, Lily finds out his name is, and she immediately decides she doesn’t like him. He’s the kind of obscenely good-looking that doesn’t look quite right existing in the real world, all elegance and sleek black hair and liquid eyes, lounging on an armchair with a glass of something amber in one hand and expensive looking boots up on a pouf.

‘You must be Evans.’ There’s something mocking about his voice. ‘James here hasn’t shut up about you and the Order.’

‘James, What the fuck?’ snaps Lily, turning on him. ‘He knows about the Order? He knows my name? You’re not supposed to tell anybody. Jesus. You haven’t told him anything else have you?’

‘Well, yeah, but I mean, its just Sirius, isn’t it?’ he says, as if this should somehow be significant to Lily. Sirius looks rather pleased with himself.

‘He hasn’t been able to keep a secret from me since his sixth birthday when he told me what he wished for when he blew out his candles then cried for four hours because he was scared it wouldn’t come true.’  

Lily doesn’t dignify this comment with a reply.

‘I don’t care who he is, you can’t just go about telling people!’

‘Hey, I’m not just people.’ says Sirius haughtily, and she can’t quite tell if offense in his tone is mocking or not. 

James gives Sirius another look, and they seem to have an entire conversation in the space of about two seconds, because Sirius rolls his eyes, rises, and excuses himself to get another drink.

James tells her that Sirius has a relation, a cousin or something, in with Tom Riddle’s inner circle. According to her, the information about Lestrange was leaked on purpose, and he and Lily will be ambushed when they turn up and tortured for information.  He swears that Sirius can be trusted, that he trusts him with his life, that they’re like, _Best Bros Forever_ or whatever the fuck, and eventually, Lily relents. Its not that Sirius himself seems particularly trustworthy, but there’s something so earnest in James’s eyes, so far from his usual smirk, that she can’t help but believe him.

‘Fine. Whatever.’ she says, ‘But Moody wont go for it, and he’ll probably murder you for leaking Order secrets. We’ll have to come up with a story as to how we got the information.’  

Sirius rejoins them with drinks for everyone and James orders Pizza and the three of them sit around the coffee table brainstorming elaborate lies to tell Moody, and its much more fun than the situation warrants.

‘What did he wish for?’ asks Lily eventually, once the drink is all gone and the pizza is finished and the clock has gone way past midnight. ‘On his sixth birthday?’

Sirius grins at her.

‘World peace. A fucking _six_ year old. Can you believe?’

‘

***

Sirius’s cousin is right. Luckily, Moody believes their story, and twenty Order members turn up at the warehouse instead of the originally planned two. They manage to take out all twelve of Riddle’s men, obtaining only a few minor injuries themselves. Moody seems to finally, _actually_ trust James, giving both him and Lily a nod and rough claps on the back. He doesn’t even outright dismiss him when James says he has friends who could be helpful to the Order, just nods and promises to discuss it in the future.

**

The next mission the two of them have together is a success. Lily has never been fond of paired missions, preferring to rely only on her own instincts, but she and James just seem to click. Working with him feels like having an extra set of limbs. They’ve only known each other for a couple of months and yet he seems to know what she’s thinking before she has even realised that she’s thinking it, and she in turn always knows exactly what his next move is going to be just from the twitch a muscle or the set of his shoulders. Somehow they have learned the language of each other’s bodies without even trying. Moody begins assigning them more and more important missions, always together, and they smash each and every one. Sirius feeds them information. They feel unstoppable.

**

Eventually, inevitably, Sirius is initiated. It seems James has already been passing on his knowledge, because he’s already infuriatingly good at everything, and more infuriatingly still, Moody seems to take an instant liking to him. Lily has to admit that he and James make a formidable team. They seem to speak paragraphs in hand gestures and formulate entire plans in quick glances. They insist that they work better with the full team on board, and finally, finally, Moody relents, and allows Peter Pettigrew and Remus Lupin to join the team. Together, they have an undeniable talent for coming up with elaborate plans just on the right side of ridiculous, a skill James attributes to their years of Pranking people as teenagers, and it isn’t long before Moody is enlisting their help to plan every mission. James, fighting injustice, with his three best mates and Lily at his side, has never been happier.

Looking back, Lily supposes that they were over confident. That they probably should have seen it coming. That it was only a matter of time before they managed to fuck up.

**  
It’s not even supposed to be a big mission, they’ve done much bigger. There are four targets, at least there’s supposed to be, according to Sirius’s source. Usually they’d dig a little deeper to confirm, send in some spies, make sure they’re not being duped, but their source has never been wrong before and this is like their _thirteenth_ mission, so they don’t bother. Their plan is ingenious and Peter managed to hit 10 targets in a row in practice last week, and they’re confident enough that they stop for powdered donuts on the way because they’re running early.

Its not until Lily has separated from the group and snuck into the old warehouse from the back that she realizes that something’s wrong.  There are only supposed to be two people in the backroom, keeping guard of the rear entrance, but there’s three, and she’s about to back out, call it all off, but then there’s a bang from somewhere in the building signaling that Peter has already started his phase of the plan and she has no choice but to go on. She manages to shoot the first two, a pair of heavy-set men, before the third even manages to locate her. A woman, of about Lily’s build, as far as she can tell. Lily dives behind a shelf as the woman takes a shot, but not quite fast enough. There’s barely the air in her lungs to scream as she feels a blow to her shoulder, so she chokes it back, leaning against the shelf for support. It’s only a graze, not enough to do any real damage, so she grits her teeth and tries to ignore the throbbing pain.

‘Ooooh, who’s there?’ says the woman in a shrill, sing-song sort of voice. ‘Don’t be shy, come out and play.’  Lily is quick despite her injury, and within seconds the woman’s body hits the ground.

Lily barges through into the main room, and freezes. It’s utter chaos. For a second she can’t move, blood running cold, stomach turning. She doesn’t have time to count but they’re massively outnumbered. Peter is unconscious, bleeding from somewhere though she can’t tell where. James is in a physical fight, throwing punch after punch, just about dodging his opponent’s blows. Sirius and Remus are behind broken bits of shelf. They’re yielding guns and occasionally emerging to shoot, but mostly just trying to stay alive.

Lily slips back into the backroom before anybody can see her, and begins stripping. She has no idea if this will work, but her and the woman are a similar build, and its dark, and James friends care about him too much to risk hurting him, and hopefully Riddle’s men are more brawn than brain…

She slips on the slightly too large clothes of the woman, and trades her own yellow balaclava for the woman’s black one. Then she takes a steadying breath and steps back out into the main room. She sends a bullet into the head of the man fighting James when she is sure nobody is looking, and only James seems to realize, looking round for his savior.

His savior punches him in the jaw, gets him in a headlock, forces him to his knees then holds a gun against his head.

‘Stop.’ Lily screams, in the shrillest voice she can manage. She’s never been good at impressions, but she sees no other choice.

‘One wrong move and Glasses over here is getting a bullet in the head.’

***

Lily Evans is holding a gun to his head and he can feel the barrel kissing the base of his skull and he can almost imagine what it’d look like if she pulled the trigger, slouched forwards with his brains splattered like goo, but he smiles.

He isn’t sure if Lily knows that he knows it’s her, but he does. He’d recognise that voice no matter how she contorted it, and he spotted a flash of green as she was wrestling him to the floor that he couldn’t forget even if he tried, and she still smells like her favourite perfume and powdered donuts and _Lily_. James has no idea what she’s doing, wonders if Lily even has any idea what she’s doing, but he smiles beneath his mask, because last time they were here it ended with a kiss and half a Terry’s chocolate orange.

But now Sirius is staring at him with a look of horror James has never seen on his features before and it sobers him, and Remus is scrubbing hands through his hair and chewing through his lip so hard its starting to bleed, and James hopes that Lily has an actual plan. Then he hears her take a ragged, painful sounding breath, and it occurs to him that one wrong move and Lily Evans could actually die here. She would never fall asleep on his sofa or raid his fridge for snacks or out-shoot him at target practice with a grin and a wink ever again. She’d never sit with her back against his legs like she does, hair all piled up in that way she does it when she can’t be bothered to style it, half asleep and yawning, still rambling on about some hare-brained scheme they both know full well is never going to work. The thought makes his stomach drop, makes something inside him twist, and it takes everything he has to stay silently on his knees whilst she stands there like an open target. But he knows that that’s the only way any of them survive this, Lily included, and so he stays.

‘It’s over,’ Lily says, and James doesn’t miss the slight waver in her voice, though everybody else seems to. ‘Hands up, the two of you. Drop your weapons. Dolohov, Avery, get ahold of them. Careful- weapons away. We need them alive for questioning.’

There’s a tense moment, in which nobody moves, and James prays that Dolohov and Avery, two of their original targets, are actually present and that Lily’s instructions to keep them alive don’t contradict any prior instructions to kill them. Nobody argues, and eventually two figures move to stash their guns away and grab Sirius and Remus roughly from behind.

‘You three,’ Lily says, gesturing at the three figures closest to the door, ‘Out front, keep an eye out, there could be more of them waiting-‘

‘But Bellatrix-‘

‘Are you questioning my _authority_?’ Lily spits back, obviously recognizing Bellatrix as the name of one of Riddle’s closest lieutenants, and James has to admire her nerve.

There’s another tense silence, but then they comply, and the ten people that had been in the room drops down to seven.

‘You two-‘ Lily says, pointing at a man and woman standing close together. ‘Out back, check on the other three.’ The two of them comply, and James barely has time to wonder what Lily is planning before she’s lifting the gun from his head, and shooting, shooting, shooting.

**

Lily figures this is as best chance she is going to get, with five of them temporarily out of the picture, and two busy holding Sirius and Remus, she manages to kill three of them before they even realize anything’s wrong. Sirius catches on pretty quickly and head-butts his captor, sending him flying far enough away for Lily to safely put a bullet in his head. James is already up on his feet, scrabbling for a gun, and then running headfirst at the figure holding Remus. There’s a scuffle and a gunshot, and then James is getting up, and pulling Remus to his feet.

After that, it’s easy. The two men in the back appear first and they don’t stand a chance. The three Lily sent out to the front follow and James, Lily and Sirius put a bullet into one each whilst Remus rushes to Peter who is now in a small puddle of his own blood.

Lily feels her head spinning, and suddenly remembers her own injury from earlier. She looks down and there’s blood soaking through clothes, more blood than she remembers, more blood than seems right. She takes a deep breath, shudders, then promptly passes out.

**

Lily wakes up briefly a few times, feeling foggy and heavy and slow, but when she wakes up properly she is on James’s sofa. Its softer and much more familiar and comforting than the few times she drifted into consciousness on one of the scratchy white beds in the Order’s makeshift hospital wing. She wonders how many nurses James had to argue with to be allowed to take her home whilst she was still unconscious. James is there now, glass of water and tablets in hand. Slowly she leans up on one elbow, takes a sip of the water. It hurts to swallow.

‘Are these gonna make me sleep again?’ she mumbles, and he shakes his head. 

‘Just pain relief.’ Lily nods in approval and swallows them down.

‘Think I’ve been out long enough. How long has it been?’

‘Three days.’ James replies, and at her widened eyes, adds ‘Well you were shot. To be fair.’

‘How’s Pete?’

‘Worse than you, but he’ll make it.’ 

She nods, closes her eyes, and despite all her protests, falls back to sleep.

**

A week later and Lily is sitting on James’s kitchen counter eating Cheerios out of the box whilst he stands besides her, leaning against the side, laughing at her jokes even when they’re not funny because its only been two-hundred and forty-six hours since she didn’t die and he hasn’t quite finished being grateful yet. Her hair is piled up on her head and she keeps grinning at him like they’ve been on some brilliant adventure.

‘Remember that time we were nearly all _killed_ but I swooped in at the last minute and saved everybody like a total boss?’ she says around a mouthful of cereal, and James rolls his eyes. He opens his mouth to make a jibe at her, but what comes out instead is ‘I’m really fucking glad you aren’t dead, Evans.’ He expects her to tease him for such a statement, but instead she’s grinning even wider, and leaning in, and kissing him right on the mouth.  For a second its like he can’t breathe, but then he can, and he’s kissing her back like his life depends on it. Like it’s the most important thing he’s ever done. Whenever he has imagined kissing her in the past she has tasted like cherries or chocolate or powdered donuts, but right now its eight in the morning and she’s only just woken up so mostly she just tastes like cheerios and morning breath. He wouldn’t change it for anything.

She pulls away from him momentarily to grin.

‘I’m really fucking glad you aren’t dead, either.’


End file.
